Two days on, thousands of words in. After those words are spoken, they’re added to a binder, which grew beyond thick Monday afternoon and continues to expand. It’s a forever record of trauma and loss.

These are quality words, laboured and wept over over, propelled by that April 6 crash that killed 16 people on the Humboldt Broncos’ bus. Truck driver Jaskirat Singh Sidhu pleaded guilty earlier this month, and this week’s sentencing hearing has been dominated by victim-impact statements — 75 filed, 65 read by the time it ends.

Adam Herold’s father Russ wrote 12 pages by hand, blue pen on white paper. He told about his farm-loving son who died six days short of his 17th birthday.

“We have not buried him yet,” Russ read aloud on Tuesday. “When we recently returned home from a trip, I took his urn, set it on my lap and cried as I showed him pictures from our trip. Commenting to him about places we had been together as a family. Do you have any idea what it is like to hold your 6-foot-2, 200-pound athletic son on your lap like I did when he was a baby? Only now he is in a can. It’s DEVASTATING.”

The last word was hand-written like that, all caps, all feeling, all raw emotion — his deeply-loved son in a can, and how else can a father feel?

A day earlier, Toby Boulet told the court about taking a needed break while writing his victim-impact statement. He visited his son’s gravesite — cleaned it up, washed the monument, straightened the flowers. He tried to read his statement to his boy, there at Mountain View Cemetery, but couldn’t stop crying.

“I am wounded as I sit and write. I cannot even see the keys. I just want to hold my boy. I hurt everywhere — I just want Logan to come home,” Boulet wrote then, and read on Monday.

They lived their pain on paper and in words Monday and Tuesday. Forgiveness swung back and forth, family to family — some willing, some not.

Former NHLer Chris Joseph and wife Andrea, whose son Jaxon was killed in the Humboldt Broncos bus crash, enter the Kerry Vickar Centre, which is being used for the sentencing hearing in Melfort, SK on Tuesday, January 29, 2019.Liam Richards /
Saskatoon StarPhoenix

“I despise you,” she added, “for taking my baby away from us. The fact that people say you made a mistake makes me want to throw up.”

She talked Tuesday about saying goodbye to her son in a funeral home.

“Have you ever kissed a dead body before?” she asked Sidhu. “I never thought in my life I would be kissing my dead son’s eyelids, nose, cheeks and lips over and over again, as I knew this would be the last time I would ever feel his skin under my lips. If I could have, I would have stayed with him, beside him, until the moment his dead body could not stand the warmth. Do you know what it feels like to kiss a dead body? It’s so cold, but the skin feels delicate, and you just want to make everything better but you can’t.”

Chris Joseph, Jaxon’s father, held up a pair of socks in court. He pulled those socks off his dead son’s feet, and carries them daily in his pocket — “for me, it’s almost like a baby’s blanket,” he told reporters later.

“It’s like a safety blanket, a comfort blanket for me.”

Celeste Leray-Leicht told the court Tuesday about her mature, loving son Jacob, and the morning of April 6, when she polished his dress shoes for the big game, something she’d never done before. She gave him strawberries in a Ziploc bag for the bus, kissed him goodbye, wished him luck in his playoff game against Nipawin.

Several hours later, after midnight had already passed, she pulled her daughter, a visiting friend, and that friend’s mother into a room, telling them “Jacob died in an accident tonight.

“As this was happening,” she added, “my husband Kurt went to the basement, where Isaac and Jacob each have a room, and I heard my son cry out with pain, yelling ‘No!’ No one slept that night. We moved beds, taking turns sleeping in Jacob’s bedroom. I held a frightened Kiana. In time, we learned that she couldn’t sleep because she was afraid, imagining that Jacob lay in the bitter cold snow, alive and waiting for help all through the night.”

Leroy Haugan (third from the left), father of Humboldt Bronco’s coach Darcy Haugan, with family and friends enters the Kerry Vickar Centre, which is being used for the sentencing hearing of semi driver Jaskirat Singh Sidhu in Melfort, SK on Tuesday, January 29, 2019.Liam Richards /
Saskatoon StarPhoenix

Christina Haugan shared the devastation caused by the death of her husband Darcy Haugan, the Broncos’ head coach and general manager. He left behind a wife, two boys, an extended family.

That strong and loving male influence in her boys’ lives: Gone. Her husband, her partner: Gone. But she forgives Sidhu, she says, because her husband — a godly, faith-filled man — would have wanted her to.

The Lord’s forgiveness was a theme Tuesday. Paul Jefferson, who billeted the deceased Parker Tobin and survivor Tyler Smith while helping with team chapel sessions, said he felt called to extend a hand of grace — aided by Sidhu’s guilty plea.

Don’t ruin his life forever, he told court.

Opinions split and diverge, but everybody, in every statement, agrees with this: So much potential, wasted and lost one bleak night at a highway crossroads.

“We will never know: Did we lose a great farmer, an NHL hockey player, a lawyer, a doctor, a future premier, maybe the prime minister of our great country?” Russ Herold asked. “But I know that I lost a piece of my soul, and my heart, my love, my son.”

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We work all the time back and forth between private and public, so often times if families don't want to wait they will often opt to start privately and then when their name comes up we will transition them over to the public sector."